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70 A.B.A. J. 51 (1984)
Justice Delayed

handle is hein.journals/abaj70 and id is 53 raw text is: By James S. Granelli JIMMY Lee Gray choked and gasped as he sucked in cyanide gas with every breath he took. His body pulled against the restraints that held him to the chair in Parchman Prison's gas chamber, and his convulsive fits lasted for long moments. The execution took place in Mississippi last September, but the events that led to it happened many years before. The child he murdered-Deressa Jean Scales-strangled in a no less agonizing way. He shoved her head into a muddy puddle of water in a shallow ditch off an old logging road near her home in Pas- cagoula, Miss., on June 25, 1976. He had fondled her vaginal area and had sod- omized her before forcing her to inhale the mud. He jammed her body into the trunk of his car and drove to a nearby bridge over Black Creek, where he tossed her into the stream below. Gray was 27 years old at the time of the attack. She was three. A seven-year delay Gray was able to delay his death sen- tence for more than seven years after confessing to police and leading them to Deressa's body. Even his mother said she thought from the start that he should be executed. He was-but not before he was tried twice, had his case reviewed 82 times by 26 different state and federal judges and had the U.S. Supreme Court act on his case at least five times. At the time Gray was one of more Deressa Jean Scales, age 3, was murdered in 1976. Her killer was able to stave off his execution until 1983. than 1,050 inmates on death row across the nation. He was only the eighth to die since 38 states revised their capital punishment statutes after the 1976 Supreme Court ruling in Gregg v. Georgia, 428 U.S. 153, which stated that the death penalty is not in all cir- cumstances unconstitutional. Execution of murderers has received wide public support. A recent Univer- sity of Chicago poll found that 73.1 per- cent of nearly 1,600 citizens responding to a questionnaire favored capital punishment. Lawyers also are in line with this view, according to the LawPoll published in the September 1983 ABA Journal. LawPoll found that 69 percent of the 601 lawyers and law students responding were in favor of carrying out the death sentences already imposed by the courts. With the death row population grow- ing dramatically in the last few years, some lawyers have been predicting a bloodbath of executions, but it simply hasn't occurred yet. The doomed pris- oners have made legal use of a judicial system that tolerates endless appeals, say judges who nevertheless find it appropriate or required to hear every petition or appeal that comes their way. When the Supreme Court rejected Gray's last-minute bid to avoid the gas chamber, Chief Justice Burger wrote, This case illustrates a recent pattern of calculated efforts to frustrate valid judg- ments after painstaking judicial review over a number of years; at some point there must be finality. 104 S.Ct. 211. Jackson County, Miss., Sheriff John Ledbetter put it more dramatically: He's had a lot more opportunities than January 1984 o Volume 70 51

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